Existentialism, the illusion of self and the two idiots up in your brain!

English is not really my first language, an excuse that should not be valid after more than two years writing articles exclusively in English, but well, here we are, I really hope you can look past the many language mistakes here, I will try to fix them as we go.

– Introduction

The article is not discussing the myth of left/right brain theory, it is tacking on a very similar distinction from a very different perspective.

This article, like every other article on this blog, is merely a reflection of my experience of life, and an attempt to express why and how I do what I do.

I do believe that being oblivious to the complexity of life is the optimal way to achieve happiness in its modern meaning, but the flaw in this is that it leaves the door open for others to easily manipulate you, because such “happiness” can be destroyed by a couple of questions, and its destruction often lead to very dangerous outcomes, such as terrorism and/or suicide.

So today, we will talk about my own observation of the human brain and how I come to understand it.

Every science on this earth was created in hopes of figuring out what the fuck is going on around us, from the experience based sciences such as biology and physics to a more hypothetical science such as philosophy and a great part of physiology.

Why would you ever want to indulge yourself in such a shitshow you ask? rather than focusing on the “good vibes” and a “be happy” consumerist lifestyle?

It’s because of how your brain functions, its inability to enjoy the same stimulus for a long period of time, and its tendency to crash-land into a dark, and very harmful ideas that lead to possible dangerous outcomes.

It is because of the fact that there are many harmful ideologies that live off your ignorance, by abusing your gullible mind through presenting problems that you were previously unaware of, then blowing out the consequences of these problems completely out of proportions, and finally presenting their ideology as the ultimate and only solution to these problems and many more!

And finally, because of your need for a clear ground to build your life on in order to fight uncertainty and provide a better experience of life for you and those around you.

So, low-key, its hella fun!

– Basic Arguments of Existence

I, the one writing this article, and you, the one reading this article are two different people, and we both exist.

I know that I exist because of my thought, my unique experience in life and the vast overwhelming benefit of not thinking otherwise.

I know that you existand other people exist because the only other option is that you are a figure of my imagination or as newly put, a simulation and that cannot be; that can not be because I dream, and I trip on drugs, and I realize that my dreams are not real because they never teach me anything I do not already know, because they never present me a complexity that I can not understand, and thus they are not real, and they can not be a simulation because they are conveniently inconvenient, if that makes any sense.

What I am trying to say is, you are real and others are real because I drive a car and use a laptop and a mobile, and all that I have very little understanding of how they work, or how to make one, and thus they were not created by me and thus they exist as much as I do.

If that made no sense, or if it was debatable, as it might be, then for the sake of this article, let us assume the other option, which is that it is far more beneficial for us to believe that we actually exist than to believe otherwise.

Many great minds tried to make sense of our own existing, and figure out our purpose and meaning, looking at the problem from every possible angle, reaching some amazing and compelling conclusions.

– You are two, at least two.

I have some issues with these “school of thoughts”, all of them.

They all assumed I am one, they all assumed they are one, one individual, one mind, one logic.

But that can’t be the case.

I know I am two, at least two.

Two different distinguishable people, able to drive my one body in very similar manners.

I am not describing mental illness here, I am talking about sane, normal, everyday people, every single “one” of them is at least two people.

How do I know that?

I know that because I was angry before, I was afraid, I was in love and I felt euphoric.

In every single situation, I made decisions and looking back at it, they weren’t the decisions I usually make, whoever that “I” I always refer to as myself.

To give you an easier example to understand what I am talking about, let’s do a little experiment:

Go grab a lighter

hold it with your right hand

Light it

Now stick your finger in the flame.

At that exact moment you try to do that, you will start to feel the presence of the other “you” disagreeing with “you”.

You want to stick your finger but you can’t, your finger is not going for it, or if it is going for it, it’s just flying over the flame, its like there is some other thing telling your hand not to do that.

But when I told you to grab the lighter you did it without this argument, then why did that happen?

And is there actually an argument?

Did you hear a voice in your head telling you not to do it? or was it just a feeling?

From this, we can deduce that your decision-making process is not unified with one opinion. Even though “you” wanted to do it, you couldn’t do it because “you” wouldn’t let you do it, but that “you” doesn’t really speak an actual language, instead it makes you feel stuff, or think visually.

“Sure let me just throw all my valuable belongings that can potentially be used as a weapon in case of need and let me just run away like a fool.” said no brain, ever.

-Your happy but gullible self.

We usually call these “Natural reflexes”, and surely they are, but the point here is that these actions were made by a decision, a decision you sure as hell didn’t make.

You always look at similar incidents and think back “oh, I should’ve done this and that instead” implying that no it wasn’t a quick decision, but rather a decision made entirely by someone else.

As far as we know about these reflexes, they are most evident in case of emotional high points, they kinda come built-in, and most of them are very similar across cultures, ages and species, yes species.

We usually describe an individuals action at an emotional highpoint as “animalistic”, you can easily see such behavior when someone is very angry.

These examples are the most basic illustrations of this other entity making decisions or sometimes overruling decisions made by the conscious you.

But are these decisions limited to quick whims of reactions or can they take control for longer?

Perhaps long enough to a degree where one “you” completely overtakes the other?

I believe and have some valid examples to illustrate that your unconscious mind can take control for a long period of time and your conscious mind can do the same, and weirdly each one of them takes you to a certain end, and that end unfolds very similarly in everyone unfortunate enough to follow either path.

Again, I do hope you are able to look past my very basic language and my mistakes, I am trying my best to make sure that I am expressing my point clearly regardless of the language rules that I happen to have very little knowledge of.

So back to the point on hand, can you, for example, get caught up in your subconscious so deeply that your “conscious you” is no longer able to take control?

Yes, and here is How I know:-

If you observe an infant up until they get a couple of years old, you will find no signs of logical thinking or reasoning outside of emotions, a very young individual is simply incapable of that and that is why we opt for emotionally stimulating methods of fear and reward to deal with them at that age.

But that is still not an evidence of having that part take extended control of you after that period, maybe it is just a matter of an undeveloped brain?

Ok, how about a terrorist going to blow himself up?

ISIS, as shitty as they are, offered us a unique and quite neatly documented and filmed insight into the twisted minds of terrorists, or to be put more accurately, into the minds of normal people after getting bent enough due to circumstance, environment, and people with agendas.

ISIS has a weird, but obviously necessary, ritual right before they send one of their blank slates to blow him/herself up, and that ritual is that they bring one sheikh and he starts telling him/her about heaven and the virgins and he observes the soon to be kebab and how he reacts. At first, I thought they do the same thing for everyone, but after watching enough of those, I understood what they are looking for.

You see, that sheikh usually starts with heaven and hell, the stuff you will have in there and what not, you know, the usual stuff we hear from religious people, then, if the individual is not showing sign like crying, laughing or both at the same time, the sheikh digs deeper, starting to talk about how he will make his commander/prophet/father etc. proud and how he will meet them in heaven, still, if no signs of EMOTIONAL HYSTERIA is showing, the sheikh will keep on giving this emotion enticing speech until the terrorist starts showing off those signs, then he’ll be ready to go!

If you think about it, this ceremony is very critical for the success of the operation, you can’t really talk yourself into pressing a button that will rip you to shreds, but you can bet your ass you’ll do it on an emotional highpoint, just as you sometimes get so angry that you feel you are about to stab someone if presented with a knife and an asshole in a convenient setting, yet outside of your rage you are a peaceful and loving individual.

And a terrorist is just like that, someone stuck in that moment of rage for quite a while, and they got stuck because life no longer made sense to their logical self, war tends to do that quite effectively, hell, to be honest, your “logical” self is not that hard to short-circuit.

You will notice that a lot of our lives entertainment depends on short-circuiting your “logical” self, nightclubs with their flashy lights and obnoxiously loud music is designed to short-circuit our brains from noticing how bad the place smells, how overcrowded with sweaty people it is, how poorly ventilated it is and how overpriced the drinks are.

Moviesare another great example.

So far we know that temporarily shutting down your capabilities to think logically leave you an easy target for manipulation and to do that we must present ourselves with high-intensity emotional stimulants for some period of time.

So what else? Do we always fall fools for the tricks of a nightclub? or it will, after a while, wear off because we got so used to it and it became so predictable that we no longer fall for it, it no longer has the ability to stimulate our emotions to the needed level?

We have all been there before, something we used to enjoy immensely no longer stimulate us, and thus, no longer fun to do.

So what does that tell us now?

We can draw a conclusion saying that we need emotional stimulates to “have fun”, these stimulants do not have to make sense and they rarely do, and finally and most importantly, our logical self is pretty fucking boring.

-Your boring rational self.

I think a lot of you will disagree with me on this one, but please give me the benefit of the doubt.

As someone who just recently took on writing for this blog – and clearly sucks at it, but this is beyond the point – I had logically assumed that when I have a steady, comfortable and routine life, I will be able to write articles freely and have all the time I need to write my heart out, but that was not the case.

Yes, after having a steady life I have more time to write, but suddenly I became uninspired. Having a steady and predictable life gets you accustomed to your logical boring self.

That doesn’t mean you will be sad, that rather means that you will be apathetic, you are neither sad nor happy, you just exist. This state is very good for running a business as all your moves are calculated and clearly thought out, but it definitely sucks for writing, composing, drawing or anything that requires creativity.

If you think about that for a minute you will understand the whole point of this article.

How can I, someone who wrote an article that was featured on The Guardian – self-boosting time!–, who thought that the only obstacle between me and writing many articles was just time, and always thought that I have a huge stream of content to provide, suddenly find myself as empty as a recently painted white wall?

I know I have the ideas in me, I know what I want to write about, I just can not write it.

Regardless of the effort I put in I still can’t form a good 500 words article that slightly entertaining to read, I can definitely come up with the words necessary to express the idea but it always comes out boring and bland.

And that was because I was stuck in my logical self.

Only a good heartbreak or some emotional turmoil can make me write entertaining articles, draw, or play the piano for hours.

That is why excellence shines through struggle.

I do not think that any of this comes off as new or shocking information for you, where I am going with this is to help you and me put the pieces together in order to understand a bigger picture.

So far I can say, from the arguments above, that if you let your deep emotional-self take control, you can, and with some unfortunate events, become a terrorist!

But what if you let your deep logical-self take control, where can it take you?

I believe that it will take you to a state of absolute nihilism.

It is interesting to see the progress of the philosophy of some of the great minds humanity had to offer, reading through a number of philosophers work and its progress, you will find a fair number of them reaching the conclusion of nihilism, the oblivion to joy and the belief of an unworthy life.

Arguing with a religious person, regardless to which religion they belong, I found them to usually express the fear of what an atheist would do, now I brought this subject up due to the weird symmetry that religious people draw between atheist and nihilist, as if the rejection of fear is a rejection of the whole spectrum of emotions?

To some extent, atheists tend to be nihilistic in nature, because after all, when the god argument is gone, it is hard to come up with a mass convincing argument to the reason of life.

Anyway, a religious person expressing the fear of an atheist which in his mind is a low-key nihilist is due to the religious person believing the atheist/nihilist lacks a moral compass and thus is capable of doing horrible things without regards to anything.

Now the idea of an atheist/nihilist doing a horrible thing due to a lack of a moral compass is a logically valid idea but based on a very flawed understanding.

A nihilist is not someone who lacks a moral compass, a nihilist in the shallow way I am describing here is someone who is too “woke” to let their emotions loose or give in to emotional stimuli in order to leave the deep logical state they are stuck in.

It is a really thrilling experience to lose your moral compass and act your will without regards, but this in its definition cannot be coming out of nihilistic viewpoint since the expression of such Moralless behavior is certainly illogical and definitely emotionally motivated.

I am obviously leaving two outliers here that do not fit with what I expressed so far, and those are people suffering from clinical depression and psychopaths, as these cases are unique to the norm, and interestingly lie on exact opposite ends.

There is so much more to talk about, and thus I will leave it to the second part of this series.

If you made it this far, then thank you for looking past my silly language mistakes and I hope you share with me what you think about this as I do not intend it to be taken as the truth but rather to be a thought-provoking article that will help me as well as you better understand each other.

If you have any feedback on this article whether it is positive or negative you can write me on @johndeus1 on Instagram or on john@mysupremacy.com

So to summarise

-Here is the TL;DR

A normal healthy individual is a mixture of two people in one body, one is emotional, fun, incapable of expressing him/herself in words and prefers to do so in pictures, the other is logical, boring, and can express him/herself in words and usually have long talks with itself. It is best to have a healthy mixture of both, allowing each side to take control on appropriate times and enjoying both pieces of the puzzle, the downside is that if you lacked the knowledge of the distinctive needs and wants of each side, you will live your life chasing unsatisfying goals while blaming the part that had nothing to do with it. Your other options are not looking too good either, you can completely indulge in a hedonistic or at the least an oblivious emotional lifestyle where you leave yourself vulnerable to manipulation by people with juicy agendas throwing questions sparkled with “meaning” and “bigger picture” that will ruin the fun forever and maybe cause you to go batshit crazy, or you go logics way and end up not seeing any point to anything due to you blocking any fun to ever come your way and probably end up killing yourself – please do not do that -.

I am obviously glossing over a lot of things here, life is too complicated, and I did not figure it out I am just merely trying to. I will talk more about the things I glossed over and some new angles to look at this shitshow, and as I said I really need your help on this one, so please share your interesting thoughts either through my Instagram @johndeus1 or through email john@mysupremacy.com or simply leave a comment.